North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Thomas Stock: North Korea’s call for peace as a means of propaganda

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

On today’s episode, intellectual historian Thomas Stock discusses his paper “Polyphonic Peace: The 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students in Pyongyang,” which explores North Korea’s hosting of the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students. This massive event, which brought together 15,000 young people from over 150 countries, was North Korea’s attempt to counter […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jaco Zwetsloot, and today I'm recording this episode via StreamYard on Sunday, the 26th of January, 2025 here in Seoul. But my guest is one day behind on the 25th of January. And my guest today is Dr. Thomas Stock. He is an intellectual historian of Korea and the Cold War,

specialized in the evolution of North Korean ideology. He's now a history teacher in Massachusetts, USA. Welcome on the show, Dr. Thomas Stock. Thank you, Jack. Thank you for having me. Now your paper, Polyphonic Peace, the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students in Pyongyang, explores North Korea's hosting of the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students,

which those long-term listeners of my podcast will know I have talked about a lot, especially in 2019 on the 30th anniversary of that festival. And I find it a fascinating theme. I like to explore it at least once a year. This event, which brought together around 15,000 young participants from over 150 countries was, and you categorize it as a strategic and ideological effort by North Korea to promote its regime and counterbalance the global influence

of South Korea, especially following Seoul's successful hosting of the 1988 Olympics. So that's one of the major things we're going to be talking about today. So when this festival was held in July 1989 with the slogan for anti-imperialist solidarity, peace and friendship. Was it a genuine call for peace or was it an ambitious propaganda event? I mean, the call for peace was a propaganda strategy that was particularly oriented toward foreign audiences in order to recruit them, to be able to get them to come to Pyongyang, to the festival. And this was something that not just North Korea did, but that historically speaking, the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries have been doing in North Korea simply copied that same strategy. Because,

I mean, peace, that the concept of peace doesn't strike you as particularly socialist, communist, right? It's something anybody can easily get behind, you know, your wall. But the way that slogan was mobilized internally in internal propaganda was different. And it was used to validate the veracity of the state ideology. Okay. And we'll get into a bit more detail on that. But first of all, why should we care about a youth festival held

35 years ago in North Korea? What makes the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students so significant that we're still talking about it and studying it today? Yeah, you know, I I ask myself that same thing. I never really intended to study this particular festival. It's just somehow it flew in my face as I was doing archival research in Germany. So I was in the East German archives and I was investigating the history of North Korean ideology. I was trying to find data on that, particularly in relation to East German ideological developments. And when I get to the 1980s, suddenly I find copious volumes of about the festival in the East German archives. I was like, what is this? So I start looking through all of these different folders on the festival. And then I was like, okay, there is a story to

be told here, particularly because the East Germans played such a crucial role in helping the North Koreans to host this festival. Yes, and actually back in 2022, I talked to Bern Schaeffer about how the Stasi helped North Korea. But I'll come back to that scene again a little bit later on. But first of all, can you explain the concept of polyphony, which is in the title of your article, and how North Korea adapted polyphony for the festival? Right. So polyphony is such, I mean, it's a bit, it's just simply a visual aid that you can use to help you understand this concept. It's not necessarily, it's not really a theoretical tool to help understand this.

Because, I mean, scholars have for long talked about Soviet front organizations or general communist front organizations, which is essentially what is going on here. That is, you have a theoretical undertone and nice sounding overtone such as peace. So peace is the overtone. The undertone is that peace is tightly linked to the state ideology, and that peace can only truly be realized through things such as socialism and communism. And that when you have these foreign youth come visit, say, North Korea, it is shown in propaganda that, oh, look, all of these youth coming here believing all in peace,

just as our state ideology describes it. So in peace again, peace is in Marxist-Leninist terms, particularly after Stalin, was tightly linked to the forward march of history, meaning that imperialism is the arch enemy of socialism, imperialism being the highest stage of capitalism. And imperialism naturally is in the name, right? And wants to be belligerent and wage war in order to colonize and subdue other places. And you know, with Khrushchev's notion of peaceful coexistence, which came out of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, we get this notion that, well, peace and socialism are actually tightly interlinked. That is to say, if the socialist countries unite and peacefully

coexist with imperialism, if they deny war to imperialism, then socialism's economic strength will only grow even stronger. And in the end, capitalism will fall into economic crisis and die as long as we don't allow them to do one, obtain new colonies and all of that. So again, this is how it's being displayed internally, why externally is just a very broad sounding slogan of peace. Right. So it sounds like the North Korea's this strategy, this polyphonic strategy, or polyphonic strategy is to make a distinction between the internal messaging and the external messaging, but using the same words. So you've got peace meaning one word internally and peace

meaning another word externally. And that reminds me of, or we can link that to something that Kim Il-sung said many years ago, and he said that Korea must be wrapped in a fog, that we don't want outsiders to understand too clearly what we're thinking and what we're doing and why we're doing it. So we use these words with a different meaning, internal and external. So is it fair to summarize polyphonic peace by saying that the North Korean government basically co-opted concepts like peace and also religion and other concepts to hoodwink the left-wing and progressive youth of the world and fool them into thinking that they're talking about the same thing and they're all on the same

ideological side. Precisely, that's precisely it. And concepts such as peace and social progress were perfect for this. And then again in internal propaganda also North Korea avoided talking about these foreign organizations, like these various youth groups from around the world that came to Pyongyang, tried to avoid attributing coherent ideologies to them and didn't try to explore what these youth meant by peace, how they interpreted peace. None of this was done. And North Korea generally talked about these foreign youth in

very broad strokes and broad terms, just calling them foreign progressive youth. Even the term social democrats was typically avoided. Because again, if peace is possible through a capitalist system, that would be problematic from the state ideology's point of view. Ah, yes, I see. Okay., well, maybe even a social democratic form, which is still by Marxist-Leninist terms, is still a capitalist system. Even if they can, if you can have peace in that way, then well, you don't necessarily need socialism. But socialist countries try to tie socialism and peace together into one, at least until Gorbachev came around.

And the whole Gorbachev story is also very fascinating. Yes. And we will come back to Gorbachev. Could you also, I've already just brought up the idea of religion. Can you mention a little bit how or explain a little bit how North Korea co-opted religion or religious ideas and use that in the 1989 festival? Yeah, the religion thing is actually something that the East Germans noted early on. Once it became apparent that the North Koreans were interested in hosting the festival, the East Germans

were analyzing internally what conditions does North Korea possess to host such a festival. And one requirement would be, well, a certain amount of religious freedom, at least to pretend to have religious freedom. And North Korea hadn't really been making efforts in that regard in the 1970s and before. And East Germany said, well, in their own internal analysis, well, it's a shame that they are not trying to mobilize religion in order to co-opt foreign groups in favor of their own policies. North Korea actually

started to do this in the mid 1980s. They started to revive their religious reach out. So they built churches in Pyongyang. They had their Buddhist and Christian federations reach out to South Korean Buddhists and Christians. And during this time, this was really also fortunate for North Korea because in South Korea, there was something called Tongye Sinhak, which was this unification theology that had come about, which was much more left leaning and open. Unlike previously, Christians were rather conservative and anti-communist. So this was a great opportunity to use. So North Korea was using its front organizations, which was the Buddhist and Christian federations,

to reach out to South Korean Christians to get them to sign certain agreements about peace and unification. Again, those agreements that were signed, of course, were drawing on scripture. Because, of course, in scripture, you can find a lot of talk also about peace as well. But then internally, when North Korea reported about these meetings with the South Korean Christians, they would not discuss scripture. They would just say how these organizations supported peace. And again, it was it was all framed in terms of North Korean ideology. Did North Korea also use religion outside of the inter-Korean context? So did it reach out to religious organizations in Europe and South America and other places?

As far as I know, yes, I don't have any concrete details about that, unfortunately, but yes, they certainly did. I mean, they kind of had to as well because many of the organizations that were among the youth groups were Christian who came to the World Festival. And those youth groups, they were complaining about Pyongyang being selected as the site. They were like, we're not going, we're not going unless you make sure that there is freedom of religion. Ah, so that was important. Now, I'd like to talk about some of the domestic impacts. How did the 1989 festival shape youth education and youth loyalty to the North Korean government. If you're already a subscriber to NK News, you can listen to full episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast Feed.

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